A proxy war against who? Iran? Do you seriously think they could give the Iraqis the level of support the US gave the Afghans in the 1980s? Also, they have no real problem with NATO in Afghanistan because they really don't want the Taleban back in power (and were quite happy for the US to oust them in the first place).
I was being flippant about learning Mandarin for the purposes of the argument, but I have thought about learning it in any case. Looks hard though.
But that is my point. The Bush administration has openly stated, in the most insulting and gung-ho language imaginable, that the United States does not negotiate. You are no longer able to deal with things in meeting rooms, because your government has essentially stated that the use of force is the only viable tool of international relations, and then they've shown the limitations of that force very publicly.
Because I think its going to be a useful skill given the way the wing is blowing.
Only a few years ago the eclipsing of the US by China was seen as a far off, ad even an unlikely, contingency. Now it is looking almost certain. They've quietly kept their heads down, developing their economy and their military, whilst the US has blown trillions of dollars on a pointless war, fumbled its economy and trashed its international reputation.
What kind of superpower can't do anything in response to such an open violation of its national security? It is the same kind of powerlessness that was demonstrated by the UK when the Russians openly murdered someone in the middle of London and we did nothing of consequence.
We in the west have squandered our soft power and shown our hard power to be just about adequate for securing two barely armed third world shitholes. This fact hasn't been missed by Russia and China.
I was referring to the use of market-like structures in schools and hospitals and such, where a 'price' for each part of the service is determined and then used to determine the quality of these services. When the NHS was told to reduce the number of patients waiting on trolleys, for example, managers removed the wheels and called them beds.
Please, don't compare the hard science of evolution with the chicken-entrail reading that is economics. Biology is a hard science that is required to make testable predictions.
Internal markets introduced into public services have always run afoul of Goodhart's Law in quite spectacular fashion, but you might know that if you actually had any idea what you were on about.
You claim 'research has shown' but you don't cite any, of course
The idea that 'markets' have some kind of near-supernatural predictive power is a political opinion which has no real basis in scientific fact. Markets fail constantly, and attempts to emulate them in non-financial situations are always disasterous.
You are the kind of person convinced they 'put themselves through school' whilst living in a country that one way or another subsides this to an extent through those taxes you so loathe.
You are the kind of person who thinks running a business is 'hard work' and a 'risk', but probably wouldn't have the nerve to say that to the face of a Chinese coal miner.
You are the kind of person who honestly thinks their own unrestrained greed and selfishness helps others in spite of the millions of people killed by such attitudes.
You are the kind of person who thinks everyone who is poor deserves it through being 'less willing to work' - which when applied to a global scale essentially means you think various non-white ethnic groups are just too inherently lazy to live. This, if you hadn't figured it out, makes you a racist.
Where you've gone wrong in your life is that your parents seem to have failed to instill in you any kind of moral code. They failed to raise a decent human being.
Time is clearly the legislatures of the world of old men who think the Internet is a series of tubes and they are being replaced by people who at least slightly more tech savvy.
The idea is that we prevent the trading of child porn images over the Internet in order to protect children from abuse.
But this doesn't make sense. The laws making it illegal to produce child porn are completely disconnected from the laws that make it illegal to distribute child porn over the internet. If someone publishes indecent images of children over the Internet they are incriminating themselves for the former crime, making the latter one superfluous.
The real purpose is clearly not the stated one. It probably isn't just a naked power grab, rather a callous bit of populism ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?")
When such laws fail, as the nature of the Internet makes them bound to, the same motives that caused them to be created causes the laws to be 'toughened'. If you had stuff like the DMCA that would make it illegal to provide any service that might conceivable allow a person to trade child porn over the internet, then you would have a law usable against any proxy server, encryption, and a host of other technologies that can protect your privacy.
I am not saying that this is a deliberate attempt to crush peoples freedom - more like a hamfisted populist attempt to crush peoples freedom.
You've hit the nail I think. We hardly ever buy products now, we buy lifestyles. An SUV isn't a vehicle, its a rugged individual driving up a hill. A hybrid is a modern, forward thinking progressive doing their part for the environment.
Your ultra-patronising, but tiresomely predictable little rant doesn't impress anybody, and certainly won't change anybodies mind.
You got off to a terrible start when you invoked "human nature" - you may as well have invoked pixies to back up your argument. The idea that there exists a "human nature" which determines our behaviour is a product of overzealous, mysanthropic game theorists trying to apply their very specific models to general human behaviour, an endeavour which has fallen flat on its face every time.
This idea has sometimes been presented as having a basis in biology, which is also bullshit. Any genetic imperatives that might influence us are clearly outweighed by the massively unnatural environments we find ourselves in, and the fact that social factors change radically in different times and places.
Its also been picked up on by arrogant little randroids such as yourself as the ideological justifiction for a system that causes millions of needless deaths each year through lack of food and preventable diseases. Don't even try the predictable 'bad apples' defence because the system you advocate has had a free run of 99% of the world for nearly two decades and the problems I described are getting worse. There is nobody else left to blame.
Whilst others suffer needlessly through no fault of their own, you have clearly enjoyed a life of luxury. Then one day you picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and discovered that far from being an overprivaleged undeserving prick you were actually some kind of champion of freedom. Naturally you need to believe this to sleep at night.
Property is theft. Coercion is used by everybody who owns property to ensure his continued dominance over that property. That is a no-brainer that I shouldn't even have to explain to you.
(I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)
And some people believe in the flying spaghetti monster but that doesn't make it true. There are about 10 million excess deaths due to starvation each year even though the world produces enough food for everyone. As a system of allocating resources, capitalism clearly sucks.
...is that the people who are described as the good guys in this article are the ones who want to control your computer, and even more they refer to those wanting to choose what to do with their own computers as 'crackers'
We are just consumers. Government and ISPs see the Internet as a means of delivering consumers to high profile commercial websites and thus generating revenue for the big boys. The fact that the Internet also allows unprecedented levels of free association and free speech is to them an unfortunate side effect. The communities and rights we so value show up as waste on their balance sheets (because all this time we spend freely associated could be spent buying stuff you know)
The question of what to do with the Moon is a specific version of the question of what to do with space in general.
Most ideas about tourism and mining are bullshit. The huge transport costs make them utterly unfeasible for the foreseeable future.
So what does space have? The answers in the name; "space". The huge cost of getting there also allows one to escape the clutches of governments, corporations and institutions that might want to impose themselves on you. Moon man is free man, simply because bothering him is just too damn expensive to be worth the trouble.
Earth society has become static. People who hold political, cultural, and economic power have become very adept at holding on to it. The 'end of history' has been imposed by force by those who are served quite nicely by the present order. Thus, if you want to really change society in any big way you must escape the reach of existing society. The only place this is possible is in space.
And, to add weight to my argument, there is of course precedent. The same applied to the Americas centuries ago, and people fled there to escape the confines of an existing and largely static society.
Apparently my brain Dont Work Right and as a result my kinesthetic responses are way abnormal. If this becomes widespread I'll be harassed so much by airlines I may as well be an Arab.
Now just keep focusing on them whilst we take away all your rights.
Peadophilia is, statistically speaking, less of a threat to your children than lightning. Seeing as how most child abuse comes from a family member, the best way for parents to protect their child from molestation is to not molest them.
Yet this insignificant threat is used to scare people into allowing the government to take control of the Internet piece by piece. Our government has an overt disrespect for its subjects (remember, we are not citizens) and seems to think we should only have such rights as allow the economy to function and no more. They need shooting, all of them.
Weimar Germany was a democracy. They elected Hitler. Just because the majority are stupid enough to swallow the scapegoating and lies doesn't make it right or not worth fighting against.
Judging by your Islamophobic comments you are probably a Christian, so I shall turn around your last question and ask what sort of people worship a Jewish zombie who is his own father and wants you to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
The idea of ethnic islands has no basis in reality outside the sick imaginations of white supremacists such as yourself. Most families start churning out integrators withing one generation of arriving.
The incidents in Birmingham between the Black and Asian communities were purely the result of a deliberately provocative media. There are a handful of people in these minorities with an agenda to start trouble, just as there are white people looking to do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Count the number of people who live in Detroit. Count the number of US soldiers in Iraq. Then go back to your fucking trailer and learn some maths.
See you all in 42 days...
A proxy war against who? Iran? Do you seriously think they could give the Iraqis the level of support the US gave the Afghans in the 1980s? Also, they have no real problem with NATO in Afghanistan because they really don't want the Taleban back in power (and were quite happy for the US to oust them in the first place).
I was being flippant about learning Mandarin for the purposes of the argument, but I have thought about learning it in any case. Looks hard though.
But that is my point. The Bush administration has openly stated, in the most insulting and gung-ho language imaginable, that the United States does not negotiate. You are no longer able to deal with things in meeting rooms, because your government has essentially stated that the use of force is the only viable tool of international relations, and then they've shown the limitations of that force very publicly.
Because I think its going to be a useful skill given the way the wing is blowing.
Only a few years ago the eclipsing of the US by China was seen as a far off, ad even an unlikely, contingency. Now it is looking almost certain. They've quietly kept their heads down, developing their economy and their military, whilst the US has blown trillions of dollars on a pointless war, fumbled its economy and trashed its international reputation.
What kind of superpower can't do anything in response to such an open violation of its national security? It is the same kind of powerlessness that was demonstrated by the UK when the Russians openly murdered someone in the middle of London and we did nothing of consequence.
We in the west have squandered our soft power and shown our hard power to be just about adequate for securing two barely armed third world shitholes. This fact hasn't been missed by Russia and China.
I was referring to the use of market-like structures in schools and hospitals and such, where a 'price' for each part of the service is determined and then used to determine the quality of these services. When the NHS was told to reduce the number of patients waiting on trolleys, for example, managers removed the wheels and called them beds.
Please, don't compare the hard science of evolution with the chicken-entrail reading that is economics. Biology is a hard science that is required to make testable predictions.
Internal markets introduced into public services have always run afoul of Goodhart's Law in quite spectacular fashion, but you might know that if you actually had any idea what you were on about.
You claim 'research has shown' but you don't cite any, of course
The idea that 'markets' have some kind of near-supernatural predictive power is a political opinion which has no real basis in scientific fact. Markets fail constantly, and attempts to emulate them in non-financial situations are always disasterous.
You are the kind of person convinced they 'put themselves through school' whilst living in a country that one way or another subsides this to an extent through those taxes you so loathe.
You are the kind of person who thinks running a business is 'hard work' and a 'risk', but probably wouldn't have the nerve to say that to the face of a Chinese coal miner.
You are the kind of person who honestly thinks their own unrestrained greed and selfishness helps others in spite of the millions of people killed by such attitudes.
You are the kind of person who thinks everyone who is poor deserves it through being 'less willing to work' - which when applied to a global scale essentially means you think various non-white ethnic groups are just too inherently lazy to live. This, if you hadn't figured it out, makes you a racist.
Where you've gone wrong in your life is that your parents seem to have failed to instill in you any kind of moral code. They failed to raise a decent human being.
Time is clearly the legislatures of the world of old men who think the Internet is a series of tubes and they are being replaced by people who at least slightly more tech savvy.
The idea is that we prevent the trading of child porn images over the Internet in order to protect children from abuse.
But this doesn't make sense. The laws making it illegal to produce child porn are completely disconnected from the laws that make it illegal to distribute child porn over the internet. If someone publishes indecent images of children over the Internet they are incriminating themselves for the former crime, making the latter one superfluous.
The real purpose is clearly not the stated one. It probably isn't just a naked power grab, rather a callous bit of populism ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?")
When such laws fail, as the nature of the Internet makes them bound to, the same motives that caused them to be created causes the laws to be 'toughened'. If you had stuff like the DMCA that would make it illegal to provide any service that might conceivable allow a person to trade child porn over the internet, then you would have a law usable against any proxy server, encryption, and a host of other technologies that can protect your privacy.
I am not saying that this is a deliberate attempt to crush peoples freedom - more like a hamfisted populist attempt to crush peoples freedom.
You've hit the nail I think. We hardly ever buy products now, we buy lifestyles. An SUV isn't a vehicle, its a rugged individual driving up a hill. A hybrid is a modern, forward thinking progressive doing their part for the environment.
This just in: Cars with two engines in them aren't the best for fuel efficiency.
How the hell did hybrids take off in the first place? (that said, I have never seen one here in the UK)
I just did retard
Your ultra-patronising, but tiresomely predictable little rant doesn't impress anybody, and certainly won't change anybodies mind.
You got off to a terrible start when you invoked "human nature" - you may as well have invoked pixies to back up your argument. The idea that there exists a "human nature" which determines our behaviour is a product of overzealous, mysanthropic game theorists trying to apply their very specific models to general human behaviour, an endeavour which has fallen flat on its face every time.
This idea has sometimes been presented as having a basis in biology, which is also bullshit. Any genetic imperatives that might influence us are clearly outweighed by the massively unnatural environments we find ourselves in, and the fact that social factors change radically in different times and places.
Its also been picked up on by arrogant little randroids such as yourself as the ideological justifiction for a system that causes millions of needless deaths each year through lack of food and preventable diseases. Don't even try the predictable 'bad apples' defence because the system you advocate has had a free run of 99% of the world for nearly two decades and the problems I described are getting worse. There is nobody else left to blame.
Whilst others suffer needlessly through no fault of their own, you have clearly enjoyed a life of luxury. Then one day you picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and discovered that far from being an overprivaleged undeserving prick you were actually some kind of champion of freedom. Naturally you need to believe this to sleep at night.
Property is theft. Coercion is used by everybody who owns property to ensure his continued dominance over that property. That is a no-brainer that I shouldn't even have to explain to you.
...is that the people who are described as the good guys in this article are the ones who want to control your computer, and even more they refer to those wanting to choose what to do with their own computers as 'crackers'
We are just consumers. Government and ISPs see the Internet as a means of delivering consumers to high profile commercial websites and thus generating revenue for the big boys. The fact that the Internet also allows unprecedented levels of free association and free speech is to them an unfortunate side effect. The communities and rights we so value show up as waste on their balance sheets (because all this time we spend freely associated could be spent buying stuff you know)
The question of what to do with the Moon is a specific version of the question of what to do with space in general.
Most ideas about tourism and mining are bullshit. The huge transport costs make them utterly unfeasible for the foreseeable future.
So what does space have? The answers in the name; "space". The huge cost of getting there also allows one to escape the clutches of governments, corporations and institutions that might want to impose themselves on you. Moon man is free man, simply because bothering him is just too damn expensive to be worth the trouble.
Earth society has become static. People who hold political, cultural, and economic power have become very adept at holding on to it. The 'end of history' has been imposed by force by those who are served quite nicely by the present order. Thus, if you want to really change society in any big way you must escape the reach of existing society. The only place this is possible is in space.
And, to add weight to my argument, there is of course precedent. The same applied to the Americas centuries ago, and people fled there to escape the confines of an existing and largely static society.
Apparently my brain Dont Work Right and as a result my kinesthetic responses are way abnormal. If this becomes widespread I'll be harassed so much by airlines I may as well be an Arab.
Now just keep focusing on them whilst we take away all your rights.
Peadophilia is, statistically speaking, less of a threat to your children than lightning. Seeing as how most child abuse comes from a family member, the best way for parents to protect their child from molestation is to not molest them.
Yet this insignificant threat is used to scare people into allowing the government to take control of the Internet piece by piece. Our government has an overt disrespect for its subjects (remember, we are not citizens) and seems to think we should only have such rights as allow the economy to function and no more. They need shooting, all of them.
Says the 'Anonymous Coward' of all people.
Weimar Germany was a democracy. They elected Hitler. Just because the majority are stupid enough to swallow the scapegoating and lies doesn't make it right or not worth fighting against.
Judging by your Islamophobic comments you are probably a Christian, so I shall turn around your last question and ask what sort of people worship a Jewish zombie who is his own father and wants you to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
The idea of ethnic islands has no basis in reality outside the sick imaginations of white supremacists such as yourself. Most families start churning out integrators withing one generation of arriving.
The incidents in Birmingham between the Black and Asian communities were purely the result of a deliberately provocative media. There are a handful of people in these minorities with an agenda to start trouble, just as there are white people looking to do the same thing.